Sri Lanka ~ Shopping and Elephants

Being a teacher gives me summers for travel! I try to visit home (Canada) regularly, sometimes it is very far away. And one of the reasons I decided to teach internationally was because I would be in far distant places where I could travel! So I did go home for part of the summer, shopping and eating great food, I was back to my post in Myanmar with a few weeks left on my vacation. So arranged a trip to visit a friend in Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka is not that far from Myanmar. This friend was Sri Lankan and I had worked with her in Morocco. She was teaching in Khartoum but was home in Sri Lanka for her vacation. I was so excited to be able to meet up with her. It was fabulous! I love the island of Sri Lanka and would love to go back again if I could.

At the beginning, she had some stuff to do so I had 2 days on my own. I was able to go around Colombo (the capitol of Sri Lanka) with the driver we had booked and do some fun shopping. There are some designer places inn Columbo that are said to actually be Sri Lankan (ODELL is one of them) and then a CoCo outlet (cotton company) which had wonderful clothes and some actually fit so I got 2 things. Cotton is wonderful for the hot humid weather in Myanmar so I was very happy. One dress had a pattern I know as kitengi which I bought. Some dresses had elephants on them (Indian elephants of course).

I stayed in a nice hotel that had a very homey feel to it. Colombo, the capitol of Sri Lanka, has a mix of stores and shopping. I saw some of the city with the sky scrapers, expected in a capitol, and the simple 'Mom and Pop' stores. The food was amazing. I was careful not to order something that would be guaranteed to be spicy so I enjoyed the flavors and freshness of the food without melting my taste buds. The only down side to my hotel was that I could hear something running around in the ceiling at night. I have had this a lot in different countries so it didn't totally freak me out but it took me a while to fall asleep - imagining mice or mongoose! At least there wouldn't be elephants up there!

The next day, she was free and we headed off on our Sri Lankan adventure! It was so nice to be with a native Sri Lankan. She knew the history, the language, the best places to go and what was worth seeing. So let me share some of the things we did outside of Colombo. The elephants come first.

Looking for Elephants:

We headed inland to an area that is on the edge of the Sri Lankan highlands and it is where the elephants are found – Kaudulla. We had planned to go into the reserve to see if we could find them. To do this we had to arrange a jeep to go on a safari into the reserve itself – our driver took us to a spot near the most expensive hotel where Jeeps waited for fares. We wanted to try down the road a bit but our driver would not take us to another spot to bargain for one…. A bit aggravating. We wondered if maybe he got a cut for any of his clients that booked with those jeeps – he was just so adamant about not going elsewhere. My friend went walking down the road a ways and found some more jeeps. She started shopping between different drivers and found some more jeeps and negotiated a price. She got it for almost 3000 rupees cheaper!! Wow – quite a discount. I could not have done that on my own. Our driver was not happy but we were. It was a bit of a drive to the park but the ‘ranger’ (our guide) was great and spoke good English. We had to stop at the entrance gate to pay our entrance fee. Not cheap. There were so many jeeps waiting to go in – it is kind of scary that so many people crowd into the park at once (but that is my wildlife biologist background coming up).

As you enter the reserve there is bamboo everywhere! It's a forest of bamboo and is actually becoming a problem there. They are trying to control it. Then across a grassy area we saw monkeys - Grey Langur or Tufted Grey Langur. The ones we saw were in small family groups. As I

realized later in the trip, these monkeys are very common throughout Sri Lanka. From there we continued over a bridge to get to a grassy area where the elephants might be and there in the

water was a huge monitor lizard...you can tell from the spots and the blunt nose. This was a big guy. I grew up in Kenya, East Africa so knew monitor lizards from there. We considered them good to have around because they ate rats, mice and some might eat snakes! You sometimes see them crossing the roads or walking across a field. They look very determined when they walk - I've never seen one run! My main exercise on this trip was shopping for photos - especially elephants so we kept going.

Finally, just ahead was a bit of a field area edging the forest and there was a small herd of elephants. I am used to African elephants but Sri Lanka has Indian elephants or Asian elephants. They have smaller ears and their body shape is quite different. Although people rarely notice this. I was so used to seeing African elephants that when I saw the Asian elephants they looked wrong - I soon realized it was their shape. They also seem a little naked because their heads look bare and many don't have tusks. I will show a lot of pictures here just because they are so intriguing - to watch as they eat or play or simply interact with each other. Elephants are extremely social and their social structure is complex. They protect each other and help each. Babies are protected by the whole herd. And this herd had some babies! I could tick this off my 'shopping list' or my bucket

list. Jeeps were everywhere. The elephants appeared oblivious to the gawking humans. It was a healthy herd with old ladies and a variety of ages- see the photo with four different sizes of elephant. I was very excited to see babies - at least four little ones. Our guide said that they thought

the littlest one was only 2 weeks old! You can see a really little one, almost small enough to still fit under its mommy's stomach. It was hard to get a picture because the herd would surround them, being sure the babies are in the middle. When the herd was relaxed the babies would play together in a group. So adorable. The babies, when they are really young, stumble as they run and their little trunks wobble all over. They don't learn how to control the muscles in their trunk until they are older and needing it to do things, around a year. Sri Lanka should be praised for protecting this beautiful giants on their island.

We left this elephant group and saw jeeps collected on the other side of the river. If jeeps gather there is usually something of significance nearby and it's no different in Sri Lanka. We followed the road that would take us to where the jeeps were circling and sure enough, beyond them was a bigger herd of elephants. It was so nice to see a healthy herd living a good life in a protected reserve. A group of young were playing, with the older ones teaching the young...they were quite gentle with them. All were in the midst of the herd. The littlest

one was pushing the bigger ones and throwing grass on them...loved watching it all. It is so interesting a small island like Sri Lanka has elephants still surviving in the wild (or a reserve).I was a zoo keeper for 14 years and always loved watching the animals relate to each other. It is also interesting how perfect their trunks are for pulling grass and sticking it in to their mouths. And then there are their eyes - red portals to gentle souls. One more picture of the cutie-pie baby - tucked in tight with mom and her aunties. This was a day without shopping and I was fine with that.

Ah...the jeep population was climbing as if at a concert or shopping center (crazy) and our driver helped us escape from that tourist herd to travel along the river roads and look for other wildlife. With the peace of the area settling over us, we drove along until we saw more animals - water birds (Egrets, Red-wattled Lapwing), ducks and storks (Open-billed) as well as some antelopes. It was wide open and if it weren't so hilly, we could have seen for miles. The highlight were the elephants but it was interesting to see the water buffalo. Wikipedia suggests there are no wild water buffalo left in Sri Lanka which is interesting.

After a while, we realized we were not seeing anything new and headed back out of the reserve and back to our driver and civilization with shops. I was delighted to have seen the elephants and a bonus of the baby. My heart was full. The driver was waiting for us and took us to our hotel for the night. See what that hotel was like on the next blog on Sri Lanka.